Mists of Pandaria Music - 15781
The recent beta patch added even more music!

Beta Class Balance Analysis

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Circular references are driving me insane when it comes to simulations! Insane!!! I want my Recount so that I can obtain realistic samples
We would like to enable addons as soon as reasonably possible. We understand it can make analysis and even playing difficult. In all of our previous expansions, overall feedback becomes more positive simply by enabling addons, because then players are playing in an environment more familiar to them.*

One of the big challenges for us is the number of reported memory errors goes up astronomically once addons are involved, and it is important for us to distinguish between what is signal (our errors) and what is noise (the addons).

* - I feel the need to caveat that we are improving the WoW UI all of the time, but players have enormously different desires for their own personal UI. Furthermore, I wanted to address this one issue because it is very relevant to theorycrafting, but this thread should not become a UI discussion thread.

Is there any particular item level you're interested in exploring at the moment, for the sake of comparing apples to apples?
I’d say that in terms of comparing apples to apples, as you say, using ilvl 463 (dungeon blues) gear for example data is a good default. That said, we’re looking at tuning for all appropriate levels, and it’s not terribly difficult for us to adjust what we’re testing on our side, to compare to your data in other gear levels, as long as you tell us what gear you’re using (such as Ashunera did on page 2).

Why has all to be a mystery that has to be reverse engineered so we can mildly understand it?
The first answer is it would probably be a full time job for someone on my team to maintain the accuracy of all of that documentation. The more important answer is that theorycrafting is a lot of fun for some players. It’s possible to remove too much mystery. Remember that you only need a basic understanding of combat mechanics to kill things. I’d wager you could do fine in Raid Finder with only the 6 buttons from your Core Abilities page. If you want to understand things in exhaustive detail there is a LOT of exhaustive detail. But you should be opting into it.

Again, I’d like to reiterate, that while we’re reading all of these posts, just like we read all of the posts in this forum, we’re explicitly using this thread to respond to theorycrafting data, mechanics, etc. This still isn’t the place to discuss “are you happy with this design,” “I feel underpowered,” “what is the intent with this design,” “you’re ignoring our feedback,” etc. All of that feedback is perfectly acceptable in other Beta Class threads (well, less so the "ignoring us" comments which are rarely productive).

I've been reading the new thread at http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5889309137 and I have some things I want to add however I m in EU server and I can't log to pitch in. Would you consider posting a reply on my behalf?
We are looking into ways to get more direct feedback from other regions, and I totally sympathize with this situation.

Given the fact that Balance is such a touchy issue, and no one takes to the forums to complain when they're top dps, I feel the devs at Blizzard put up with an amazing amount of complaining, and still do an amazing job. I applaud the CM team for sifting through the rants and raves and passing on the relevant information to the Development team, and I thank Blizzard as a whole for continuing to maintain such an incredible game.

It shows a lot of humility for Blizzard to acknowledge that despite the powerful resources at their disposal, there is a great deal of power, information, and just plain ingenuity in the community of fans. And the people at Blizzard value this information. That's a big part of why I keep playing. People from the casual gamer to the hard core theorycrafter stumble upon unforeseen builds and rotations, and the creativity of the community no doubt leaves Dev's scratching their heads at many times. So hats off to you Blizzard, keep making amazing things, and every now and then, I hope you find a thank you here and there to keep you going.
This is a super complex game, and the community is integral in fully exploring the world that we build, both in terms of in-game, and in-theory. There are so many spells and abilities and talents and glyphs and encounters and situations, etc., that trying to evaluate all the combinations and identify problems can be troublesome. Theorycrafters are a huge boon to us, and the rest of the community, because they are able to really deep dive into their own specific niches (typically a single spec), and identify problems or unintended consequences that we may miss when looking across the whole class landscape. So we figured it was about time we gave back and tried to help you guys out some as best we can. Selfishly, it can help us detect bugs in our own testing or design flaws in the rotations we've designed. There are times we assume something is working one way because that is the way we designed it and there are times when the community assumes something works one way because they can't peer at the complexities that sometimes exist under the hood.

One other thing related to global mechanics - with the change to hit and expertise cap points, and crit depreciation, have there been any changes made to the way melee roll tables work overall?
The two links you mention are old, but the ideas are accurate. White attacks are still ‘one roll’ (Miss Dodge Parry Block Glance Crit Hit), and yellow attacks are still ‘two roll’ (Miss Dodge Parry Block, Crit). The only change to that is that Block against players is an additional separate roll now. Glances can still only occur on white attacks. I believe our recent blog post about this stuff included all off the relevant chances for these, but if you have more specific questions, feel free to ask.

Also what's the deal with this (identical characters in identical gear)...
The amount of base dodge and parry you get changed, as well as the diminishing returns curves. Our previous blog post on hit table chances includes the base chances. Additionally, Strength gives a significant parry chance directly (just like Agility gives dodge chance), rather than giving a small amount of parry rating.

In PvE settings, there aren't too many DoT effects that present life or death decisions. Magics, Poisons and Diseases are either handled by the healer or by the Paladin him/herself. I'm assuming part of this is to help between Cleansing/Dispelling because of the new CD, but DoT effects only ever tick once every 2-3 sec; that means this Hand spell only reduces 2 or 3 of the DoTs ticks by 70%.
A lot more boss abilities are actually periodic than players often realize. Many of those can’t be dispelled. Examples include Fiery Grip on Spine or Black Blood of Go'rath during the tentacle phase of Zon'ozz.

Also, a couple clarifications on previous posts:

First, Strength gives a very significant parry chance to paladins, warriors, and DKs directly (just like Agility gives dodge chance for rogues, druids, shaman, hunters, and monks). We don't want Agi to be very attractive to plate-users and Str for leather/mail dudes.

Secondly, players have been curious about the combat table chances against players of boss mobs. What is described in that blog post is indeed accurate for a boss attacking a player. That does mean that a player has a base 3% chance to be missed, 3% chance to dodge (if they know Dodge), 3% chance to parry (if they know Parry), and 3% chance to block (if they know Block). That chance is indeed reduced by 1.5% per level difference, so a 92+ will never miss a 90. So to use a simple example, a monk with no parry on gear or other buffs has a 3% base parry chance, plus 5% from Swift Reflexes, for a total character sheet parry chance of 8%. A level 93 boss attacking that Monk will get parried 3.5% of the time. Hope that clears things up.

Death Knight (Forums)That sounds much better for sustained DPS comparisons of 2H and DW side-by-side, but will you address weapon twisting? I don't want carry around two 1Hs and need to have "/cast [equipped:one-handed] Frost Strike; /equip 1Hs" and "/cast [equipped:two-handed] Obliterate; /equip 2H". As others have mentioned the respective +50% damage bonuses are far too significant and ought to be spread across other abilities, which will also rein PVP burst in.
Frost DKs twisting weapons like that is something that’s on our list of things to fix before release.

Ghost, what about the damage spread of Obliterate, Frost Strike, Howling Blast, and Icy Touch? The discrepency is huge which means not using Obliterate feels bad, especially with Killing Machine. Are you guys looking into spreading around the damage better for 2H Frost?
Our internal tests are showing DW and 2H Frost DKs where we want them in terms of damage breakdowns (but a little high overall). It’s not intended that their rotations or damage breakdowns are identical. If you can provide your data and analysis, what your modeling is showing should be the optimal rotation, etc., that’d be great.

Some specific numbers regarding AotD and Gargoyle. The question becomes are they really meant to be so low?
Army of the Dead is low and just hasn't been buffed yet. Some full logs and specific gear used, situation, etc, would be helpful. I believe we do have some known issues with the Gargoyle in particular, with how it benefits from your haste.

Also, please excuse the constant ‘I believe’ and ‘I think’s and such included in all of our responses here; there is a whole team of people working on these things collaboratively, and in the interest of getting fast responses out to you all, I’m not always double-checking everything, but trying to be clear where that’s the case.

Druid (Forums)Glyph of Fae Silence, I keep asking this and never get a response I hope I can get one here. Is it intentional that Fae Silence does not work on targets already affected by Faerie Fire or is it a bug?
Bug.

Mangle Procs Galore. Bottom line up front: We have procs flowing out our ears between double bleeds and application all granting a 25% chance to go off.
As mentioned earlier, bleed ticks no longer proc the Mangle cooldown reset.

Currently Cenarion Ward will not consume the healing bonus from Dream of Cenarius. This makes Dream of Cenarius completely and totally undesirable for Guardians. That may be intentional, but some clarification would be appreciated.
This is a bug; all three level 30 talents will benefit from the increased healing buff from Dream of Cenarius. For example, a Guardian druid in Bear Form, with Dream of Cenarius and Renewal, who has recently Mangled a target so they have the Dream of Cenarius buff up, can hit Renewal to instantly restore 51% of their max health. We just fixed it to apply to Renewal and Cenarion Ward a few minutes ago, though, so you won’t see that for a build or two.

Actually, is the design intention to have both Eclipses with the same damage output for single targets and AoE?
Actually, no. We’re currently intending for Lunar to be slightly better at single target damage and Solar to be AoE damage. When you have time between phases or situations where you can use Astral Communion to quickly switch sides, you should be able to further optimize performance by tailoring which Eclipse you line up with which boss phases. The difference should not be significant enough, however, that in a Patchwerk-style scenario, you are compelled to only DPS in one eclipse.

As a side note, I posted incorrect information about Mushrooms. They DO count as Solar, and we think that's fine.

Spending a lot of our day trying to keep both Harmony and Lifebloom up (while trying to take advantage of all the new toys we got in MOP) is just too overwhelming even in MOP 5-mans.
Yes, we agree. Both of those durations could increase without much risk.

There was a post not too long ago telling the Moonkin players that you were looking into a way for us to play around with our Eclipse.
There may occasionally be times where it’s actually worth it to use AC rotationally, but they should be generally pretty rare. What it should let you do is more directly control your Eclipse cycle, so that you can ‘game’ Eclipse to line up with fight mechanics.

Mastery - As of right now Mastery is going to be the stat to miss COMPLETELY. Only two (three with Incarnation) abilities will benefit from it, both of which are based on Attack Power ONLY. Even then in 483 PvP gear, with full raid buffs and ZERO Mastery, Rip is still hitting for 300k damage.
We’re currently modeling Mastery as roughly equal in value to Crit and Haste for Ferals, typically a couple % better. If you can provide any more detailed analysis, we’d be interested in seeing it.

Incarnation - As of this point Incarnation is bad for Feral druids. Due to Ravage and Pounce's 50 energy cost, there is just not enough energy to compensate normal shreds. based on my analysis you are looking at a 600 dps loss if you spec into Incarnation. If Ravage and Pounce cost 40 energy instead, then it would be a dps buff.
Incarnation should allow you to replace several Shreds with Ravages. Ravages are indeed more expensive, so the CP per energy will be lower (except above 80%, where it will be much higher). But, Ravage does ~50% more damage than Shred, for only 25% more energy. Is your modeling show that that’s not enough to be a sustained DPS increase? (Not to mention being a significant burst DPS increase.)

I'm still in the early stages for Guardian but as of this point bears will only need to gear for dodge > crit > hit/exp > haste > Mastery up to 6 rage per second. This allows for at least 1 stack of Savage Defense will be available at all time. Beyond 6 Rage Per Second you will get to 0 stacks at some point during the fight. Beyond 6 RPS, uptime on SD only grows minisculally beyond 60% (6.66 RPS - 61.16% uptime; 7.5 RPS - 61.33% uptime; 10 RPS - 61.6% uptime) For example, with 6.666 RPS, we can use Savage Defense every 9 seconds up to 3 minutes into the fight. Afterwards we can use it every 10 seconds.
While there is effectively a ‘cap’ on converting rage to Savage Defenses uptime (as you describe, that’s effectively 6.666 RPS to use it on charge cooldown), that should translate to a very ‘soft’ cap on hit/exp/crit, as streaks of rage gain and rage drought may occur. And, more importantly, Frenzied Regeneration should provide a very attractive value in bleeding off excess rage, which is effectively uncapped. Our current design is that against difficult content, Savage Defense provides more average damage mitigation than Frenzied Regeneration heals, but given that it is avoidance (and thus not necessarily reliable), you will sometimes resort to using Frenzied Regeneration to smooth over spikes when you feel you need to. The goal in terms of feeling is that you should ‘want’ to use Savage Defense as much as possible, but sometimes you ‘need’ to Frenzied Regeneration to respond to unexpected spikes in damage.

2) Overlapping Mangle procs.
3) Thrash 6 second CD.
4) Dead GCDs.
The proc to reset the cooldown on Mangle from Thrash, Lacerate, and Faerie Fire now all occur on initial hit, instead of on bleed ticks. It should no longer be possible to get multiple procs within the same GCD, or to have any benefit from purposely leaving GCDs empty. Can you offer any further details about how the rotation can be gamed in these sort of ways?

Hunter (Forums)Powershot and Barrage are both broken. Neither of them are doing 400% weapon damage (Edit: to primary target). Tested with static damage white bow, no pet and no gear on. On top of that, there's no scaling from RAP. So, they're extremely underwhelming for PVE.
I believe there was previously a bug with their damage calculations, but that has been fixed. If you can try in the next build that goes to Beta, and provide data, that would be helpful.

I've found it incredibly frustrating that Misdirection hasn't worked from day one.
Misdirection works correctly in a group. There is a bug preventing it from working when you are not in a group, which means you can't MD to your pet when solo. This will be fixed in a future build.

Also, Powershot vs Barrage. Currently as is, there is no reason in to take Powershot over Barrage for PvE, unless you specifically need it for the knockback. They have the same focus cost, same effective cast time, same damage... but Barrage has half the cooldown, making it the clear winner. And while they both have the same effective cast time, Barrage is channeled, which means damage happens right away up front. Powershot requires a 3 second cast. Lynx Rush's damage, in all the testing I've done, is abysmal. It does not warrant a 1.5 minute cooldown at all.
We generally try not to make you choose between Damage and Utility, so tuning talents that are each Damage+Utility can be tricky. It does seem that Barrage always wins on damage right now, so look for changes to one of them in a later build. If you have some data and/or analysis on Lynx Rush, we’d be interested.

Mage (Forums)Currently estimating Frost's and Fire's damage distribution to be something roughly like…
I believe there are a few changes coming in the next build that will significantly change that breakdown for Frost. Once you get that build, we’d love to see your further analysis.

I've discussed this in the Mage threads, but one source of concern at the moment is the three Bomb spells and their interaction with Brain Freeze. Taking just the bomb spells themselves, they all obviously have different strengths at different numbers of targets and in different situations. Frost Bomb is weaker than the other two bombs in 2-3 target cleave situations, and that's fine. However, with the buffs to Brain Freeze FFB, we run into a more significant problem. When only a single bomb is active, all three bombs produce similar Brain Freeze PPM, but multidotting changes the picture a great deal.
Regarding the mage Bomb spells, that’s something we definitely want to balance right. The concern of Brain Freeze procs making Nether Tempest always optimal for Frost mages, regardless of the number of targets involved does seem to be a problem; we’ll investigate that.

Monk (Forums)Most of what we've been modeling so far has been focused on nailing down our "rotation" and the interaction between Purifying Brew and Blackout Kick/Shuffle. Mostly we've been trying to figure out when to use which one, and if we'll have any chi left over for anything else. It's something I do want to add as soon as we can hammer that part out, though. Think I have most of the mechanics down on it... Seems to proc from any melee attack (including Tiger Strikes?), and doesn't appear to have an ICD. Only question I have is what the actual proc rate is, since that's pretty darn tricky to work that one out. Guessing it varies with weapon speed?
Gift of the Ox can proc from all successful melee attack hits. On special attacks, it has a 10% proc chance. On white hits and Tiger Strikes hits, it has a [WeaponSpeed/25]% chance for 2H weapons, and [WeaponSpeed/50]% chance for 1H weapons. For example, while dual wielding 2.6 sec speed fist weapons, each white hit will have a 5.2% chance to proc.

Another question regarding Brewmasters: A few builds ago we had Recoil as a proc from our autoattacks that generated extra energy. I no longer see it in my spellbook. I don't recall seeing any mention of this in any list of changes posted anywhere so was this removed intentionally or is this a bug?
Intentional. We’re currently opting for Gift of the Ox and Brewing: Elusive Brew to fill the role of providing value to offensive stats for Brewmasters. That’s one thing I wanted to point out though; I haven’t seen Gift of the Ox included in any of the community modeling we’ve seen so far, and it’s rather significant.

Patch isn't live, but the tooltip for Sturdy Ox says the bonus regen was cut down to 15%, which puts us all the way down at 9.2/s.
This is a tooltip error that is fixed for the next build. It was accidentally displaying the health increase number for both of those figures. It still gives 30% increased energy regen rate.

As an aside, as our spells have become increasingly more complex, our tooltips have had a harder time capturing the real values. We then have to resolve a lot of tooltip bugs (at least the ones that can be resolved) and these then get data mined as real changes to the spells. All of that can make the beta process more confusing and feel more iterative than it really is (though it is plenty iterative).

Mistweaver with a agility weapon is hitting harder with some abilities since most of the melee abilities scale with weapon damage, are you going to fix that in a good way? I can see a lot of Mistweaver going for an agility weapon. And abilities like Chi torpedo (doing 10k healing in agility and 2k in intellect) and rushing jade wind do more damage in agility gear than intellect gear, even though we have more attack power in intellect gear.
There were some bugs with Mistweaver damage in particular in previous builds, and still a couple known issues, as you mention. It’s not intended that a Mistweaver benefits from using an Agility weapon, even when doing full Eminence healing, and we’ll make sure that’s the case before release. I believe it currently is somewhat beneficial, which we’ll solve.

I guess my main concern with the current windwalker is that 20-30% of simulation time is spent waiting. (while this is just an early similation and definitely not complete).
While seeing your more detailed data would be interesting, that doesn’t sound out of line with our expectations. Similar to other energy users, they aren’t expected to be 100% GCD locked. Their GCD usage should increase with gear, though. Just what % of their available GCDs being used feels ‘right’ is very subjective, and is something that we are interested in feedback on, but this isn’t the thread for that.

Regarding Windwalker Monks, the new Blackout Kick dot component is a little broken at the moment. The assumed function (or at least our consensus) of the dot was to roll in a manner similar to ignite ticks for mages, but it currently seems to do almost anything but roll at all. Is the dot supposed to stack or 'roll', or are we supposed to monitor its duration to ensure no overlap?

In addition, Fist of Fury is presently in the running to be included in the Windwalker single target damage rotation. Is this an intended design, or should it be used a little more sparingly as the situation calls for?
I believe the build currently on beta has several bugs with the Blackout Kick DoT, which are fixed in the next build you get. It should ‘roll’ like Ignite does. That is to say, that at the end of the fight, total Blackout Kick DoT damage should exactly be 20% of your Blackout Kick direct damage, regardless of any overlaps in the DoT effects (minus the usual rounding differences and whatever overkill damage there was, of course). Fists of Fury is intended to be useful on a single target, but there may be times that you save it to use it at a better time where its utility is more valuable.

Do you expect the level 30 monk talents to fit into monk rotations? Are they just there for a heal/damage combo that we'd situationally use over a more damaging attack or should we be expecting to fit them into our normal ability usage? Is energy regen finalized for monks at 8/s for Windwalkers and 10.4 for Brewmasters?
They’re currently not intended to be used rotationally (at least on a basic Patchwerk encounter), but may adjust them somehow still. Energy regeneration rate isn’t set in stone, but we don’t currently have plans to change it.

Are Tiger Strikes supposed to be additional melee attacks for the purposes of enchant procs? They don't seem to be affected by dodge, parries, or glancing so I'm wondering if they're really just doubled autoattacks.
Tiger Strikes are intended to feel like additional auto attacks, but are built differently. Tiger Strikes (the buff) should be able to proc from regular auto attack swings (even misses). The buff charges should similarly be consumed by regular auto attack swings (even misses), and a Tiger Strikes attack should fire. This attack is displayed in white in the floating combat text, but as you should see via the combat log, is really a ‘yellow’ melee attack in terms of how it calculates its hit table. It can miss, be dodged, parried, blocked, etc. As it’s really a ‘yellow’ attack, it cannot glance, though, and does not suffer a reduced chance to hit due to dual wielding. Its proc rate is one of the knobs we have to help tune DW vs 2H monks, since it favors DW somewhat due to not suffering the DW hit penalty. They are currently considered procs for the purposes of not being able to proc additional procs. However, they are explicitly set to count as auto attacks for the purposes of Brewing: Elusive Brew and Eminence.

Paladin (Forums)How is the Sacred Shield talent intended to work?
In the current build you have, it appears to function very oddly, but is actually bugged and doesn’t even work how it looks like it does. So, don’t bother trying to investigate the nuances of the current version of it. We just rebuilt it to function closer to our intended design. The new version you should get in the next build is much simpler and easier to understand. It’s a ‘shield over time’. Instantly, and every 6 sec, it refreshes a simple absorb shield on you, which absorbs up to X damage. That shield is no longer ‘1 charge’ or anything; it’ll work on streams of little hits or slow big hits just as effectively. The absorb shows up as a separate buff, and is removed if the main buff is removed or expires.

Priest (Forums)Regarding the healing per mana versus the healing per second between the chakra serenity and chakra sanctuary stances:
Thanks for this analysis. It does seem clear that Serenity is underpowered compared to Sanctuary, and we’ll be adjusting one of them in a future build. We also realized that the specific spells which were affected by either Chakra (including the Renew refresh and Serenity crit bonus) were inconsistent and out-of-date.

How exactly does Shadow Word: Insanity work? It seems like the damage is increased in some way based upon how long each DoT consumed has been ticking when Insanity is cast. Is it based off number of ticks? % of base ticks? % of ticks adjusted for haste?
The damage scales based on the percentage of ticks that have already gone off from the spell (specifically, for each DoT, the damage is increased by (# ticks elapsed / (total ticks – 1)) * 100%, so for a base SW:P which would tick 6 times, SW:I gains 20% damage per tick elapsed), the tooltip should reflect this in a future build. The intention is that you can use Shadow Word: Insanity in solo combat when a mob is getting low to help push them into Shadow Word: Death range, or before your DoTs fall off on a raid boss to eek some more damage out of them. The damage increase based on duration is there to avoid a situation where the right way to play is to apply your DoTs and then blow them up, which we don’t consider fun gameplay.

Oh, speaking for secondary stat balancing, the last lot of numbers I ran for Shadow Priests had Haste at something like 0.8 (relative to Int at 1.0, though true this was before Mind Surge was removed), Crit around 0.5 and Mastery a pretty poor 0.25. (Numbers for level 85).
Shadow’s rotation (especially with some talents) is something that has been in flux lately, and that’s one of the few remaining places where we haven’t balanced secondary stats how we’d like yet, while we work to nail down the rotation changes. Off the cuff, I’m sure that crit is relatively underpowered currently, due to removing the mechanic where Mind Flay crits reduce the cooldown on Shadowfiend, and not compensating for that elsewhere, yet. Mastery is also one of the last things we tune when trying to balance secondary stats, as it’s typically the easiest to get right by simply changing the coefficient on it. As I think I mentioned earlier, the extra ticks should function 100% like additional real ticks, and there were some bugs with that in your current build, which we’ve since fixed.

On the topic of Shadow Priest AoE again, obviously at level 90 we're going to be balanced around using our level 90 talent pick when it comes to AoE. However without that talent (as we haven't yet modeled them all) at present Mind Sear certainly seems to be under-performing.
I believe Mind Sear being underpowered is something on our radar at the moment and we’re planning on adjusting that.

Devouring Plague procced ticks do not heal unlike non-procced ticks.

Shadow Word: Pain procced ticks do not proc Shadowy Apparitions or Divine Insight. Last I checked they also didn't benefit from 4pc T13.

Mind Flay procced ticks that crit didn't reduce the cooldown on Mindbender/Shadowfiend but that's no longer an issue.

Also from what I recall (memory hazy here) procced ticks also didn't count as periodic damage when it came to proccing things like the Necromantic Focus trinket.

These do all sound like bugs; I believe most of these are fixed in a later build (probably not the next one you get, but the one after that). As you've probably seen by now, Shadow is one of the specs whose rotation we are still tweaking.

Rogue (Forums)In a future build, you should find that glyph turned into Glyph of Adrenaline Rush: Reduces the global cooldown of your Sinister Strike, Revealing Strike, Slice and Dice, Eviscerate, and Mutilate by 0.2sec while Adrenaline Rush is active.
If you aren't using Adrenaline Rush as Assassination, you're doing it wrong. (I meant Rupture, not Mutilate.)

The general consensus among rogues is that the Glyph of Sinister Strike is a trap glyph. The added 25% damage done by Sinister Strike for a 25% increase in energy cost is not enough to offset the damage lost due to reducing combo point generation by 25%. Less Sinister Strikes will slow down Bandit’s Guile progression and will lead to less finishers thus slowing down Restless Blades interaction and resulting in fewer uses of Adrenaline Rush and Killing Spree. Is this glyph supposed to be used by Combat rogues in PvP and not in PvE, or are there any plans to address this issue?
In a future build, you should find that glyph turned into Glyph of Adrenaline Rush: Reduces the global cooldown of your Sinister Strike, Revealing Strike, Slice and Dice, Eviscerate, and Rupture by 0.2sec while Adrenaline Rush is active. (Edit: I originally stupidly wrote Mutilate here, but it is Rupture.)

Shaman (Forums)The heal spells you want to apply these buffs to are 2+ second cast time spells, and if you are still casting when the buff fades you do not gain the benefit. Which means you have 2~ seconds from casting Unleash Life to gain the Unleash Fury buff's benefit. This is an extremely short window of time!
Agreed; the duration of both of these buffs will be 10sec in the next build.

Easiest one to test with, and the one I know for certain didn't work prior to todays build, is Wrath of Unchaining. You can pop Ascendance, open and still gain stacks from using Stormstrike, but it will just idle at that initial stack count despite your standard melee attacks continuing to go off.
We found the issue that was preventing Wind Lash from triggering trinket procs, and fixed it for a future build.

A series of Enhancement dummy tests
Logs like this are great for comparing to our own internal tests and modeling, especially with the logs for each power talent. In this case they line up very nicely with what we expect. Thanks. In terms of overall performance, it looks like your performance is about where we want it at 90 in that gear, modulo some fine tuning. If there are others doing significantly more than that (e.g., if there are Windwalkers doing 65k DPS in that gear in that situation), we’re likely to bring them down. Additionally, should we need to increase Enhancement’s damage, it is indeed likely that we’d put that damage into their active abilities at this point.

Oh, something else from those logs I posted, despite being both hit and expertise capped, Earth Elemental was being dodged. I did not notice it for Fire Elemental.
Looking at the data I have in front of me at the moment, I don’t see why the Earth Elemental would be any different from the Fire Elemental. It’s possible that there’s a bug with the Draenei racial not transferring to pets (which it should) right now; we’ll investigate that. Pets should inherit your full hit table chances now. That’s a relatively new system, so if your testing shows otherwise, we’d like to see that data.

Is it intended that Enhancement Shaman can't proc "on melee hit" trinkets from regular melee attacks during Ascendence, or just a side effect/bug of the initial implementation due to the change from physical to spell damage? I suspect the Enhsim guys would find that information useful.
This sounds like a bug. Wind Lash hits should not count as normal auto attacks, but they should count as melee attacks for the purposes of procs. i.e., if Stormstrike or Lava Lash can proc something, Wind Lash should also be able to. If you can provide an example of something you think should proc but isn’t, I can check what’s going on there.

Warlock (Forums)You seem to have given the Succubus (and the Shivarra) a “regular” (in the sense that it is not a resource consuming auto-castable ability you can click on and off) auto attack which she does not have on live. Is this a bug? If not, is there any possibility the Imps will get a similar ability since they are now the only pet that doesn't have one?
Yes, this is intended for the Succubus, but we don’t currently have plans for the Imp to get an auto attack. The Imp is intended to stay a pure long range caster.

I have a question about Mastery: Master Demonology and Metamorphosis. This ability gives X% damage bonus in caster form and Y% damage bonus in demon form. The tool tips (which could certainly be wrong and in any case they are somewhat ambiguous even if they are right) imply that when you switch from caster to demon form you KEEP your caster bonus and the demon form bonus is added on top of it. However, when I compare Soul Fire damage (since that ability is available in both forms) with and without Metamorphosis it seems low, as if I was actually LOSING the caster form bonus when I went into Metamorphosis. Regardless of whether the game and/or tool tips are broken, can you tell us if you intend for the caster from bonus to stay or be dropped when you use Metamorphosis?
Master Demonologist’s damage buffs are exclusive between caster and Metamorphosis forms. The amount shown in the tooltip is the total benefit you get from mastery in that form.

3% is huge. If you don't think people are going to drain twist for 3% damage you're crazy.
This is a common phenomenon where players may try to execute a very challenging rotation for a small DPS upgrade and find they do less damage than if they just stuck with the simpler rotation. We like to leave a little bit of room for very skillful players to try their hand at maximizing damage. The huge delta in damage on the same fights should suggest that player skill is still one of the most important components to DPS. Nonetheless, we can probably bring down the theoretical gain to 1% or lower.

As part of my work on SimulationCraft I've been trying to determine exactly how the dot-speedup mechanic of Malefic Grasp and Drain Soul works, and I've decided the way it currently works must be a bug:http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5633977563
We’re definitely actively investigating that in particular, and I’ll try to get details on exactly how it works for you.

I realize that fel energy regen is bugged, but I was wondering: does the what the fel energy tool tip says, that regen is 10 energy/second, reflect what is supposed to be happening and therefore we should sim with that number?

On a related note, since pets are supposed to be energy limited rather than time limited will energy regen scale with haste or is it intend that pets won't really scale with haste (except for auto-attacks and when starting from 200 energy and cast time is briefly the limiting factor)?
The intended fel energy regen rate is 10 per second, modified by spell haste. If you have 30% haste, your pets should regenerate 13 energy per sec. I’m not sure exactly how it’s bugged right now; I believe it’s actually getting 23 per sec or perhaps 26. Regardless, 10*(1+SpellHaste%) is the intended regen rate.

Even though regen is currently too fast, mathematically at least some of the pets should be able go Out of Energy just by casting their “main” auto-cast ability, but they never do. Using the Felhound as an example, I have seen it sit there and not cast Shadow Bite even when it has more than 60 energy and SB is off cool down. Instead it tends to wait until roughly 100-110 energy before casting, which is great because when I want to cast a time critical ability like Spell Lock there is, or very soon will be, enough energy to use it rather than having to (possibly) build all the way up from zero. Did you do this on purpose or is this a bug?
This is actually intended. We modified the auto-cast functionality to only use their basic attacks when above certain energy thresholds. This has the effect that it still uses energy fast enough to never cap out and waste energy, but pools a significant amount of energy beyond that, for you to manually use on utility spells, or simply burst damage via their basic attack. Hopefully this feels intuitive and useful.

Lastly, I think there needs to be some change to the guardian cooldowns so that we can actually use them on most attempts in raid PvE without having to worry if it will be wasted on a wipe. I won't rehash all of the proposed solutions becuase that's been done enough, but with DS teir being replaced by new gear I am worried about going back to the way things used to be.
We have new tech to reset certain long cooldowns that you’re sometimes tempted to wait around for before each pull (such as Summon Doomguard), when you wipe on an encounter. This tech hasn’t been hooked up to every encounter yet, but you should be able to see this work on some encounters (such as Stone Guard on this Friday). This won’t apply to every long cooldown. Our current rule of thumb is that it applies to cooldowns longer than 5min, but no longer than 10min, but there will be some exceptions to that. It is going to be very subjective which cooldowns are included, but again our rule of thumb is: would reasonable groups kill time waiting for this cooldown to finish before starting an encounter? Please don't lobby for every cooldown you have to be included.

When I go into demon form I start doing some kind of auto-attack (I'm not sure that it actually IS auto attack but it seems like it) and I was hoping you could shed some light on what is happening because it behaves very strangely. If I equip a wand I launch “fire” balls that do white damage and the attack rate is very slow, but if I equip a staff (which has a slower attack speed than the wand) I actually speed up, launch “shadow” balls, and do yellow damage instead, and if I go unarmed it does the same thing as with a staff but less damage and maybe slightly faster.. (BTW, “fire” and “shadow” refer to the graphic you see not the magic type) I haven't yet had a chance to try swords or daggers to see if that makes any difference. What exactly is going on here?
We still have some residual cruft left over from the conversion of wands from ranged weapons to main hand weapons. The intention is currently that while you have a wand equipped, you can effectively shoot your wand as an auto attack from range, just like hunters (simple right click on a mob to auto wand), except not while moving. However, all caster spells should reset this ‘swing timer’ so to speak, so wanding should never be a part of a normal DPS rotation, any more than melee attacking is currently. This is currently working for some wands, but not others, and has some issues which we’re working to resolve. It seems that this auto wanding is also overriding the Metamorphosis Touch of Chaos, which it shouldn’t. You should be safe ignoring wanding for the purposes of DPS modeling, but if anyone finds a way to make use of it for sustained DPS we’d like to hear about it.

Anyway, what you’re really interested in is Touch of Chaos. While in Metamorphosis, you gain Touch of Chaos, which is effectively a ranged Shadow damage auto attack. It fires every 1sec (reduced by spell haste), even while casting.

Is it intended that to get max dps out of pets we have to have a macro that spams their special attack?
No, solving that was one of the primary reasons for the switch to energy on Warlock pets. However, there’s currently a bug which is drastically increasing their energy regen rate, making the balance of the different pets way off, and making them limited by cast times in some cases instead of their energy regen rate, as is intended.

I did some very simple 5 minute pet-only parses on the Raid dummies on my Warlock to compare pet damage, and I found a few issues. All the tests were done with Grimoire of Supremacy, and I did not use macros to force pet attacks. I'll investigate more thoroughly when I have more free time.
We mentioned earlier that warlock pets are all getting almost double the intended amount of energy regen, which is extremely skewing the pet balance. But, I wanted to say that these logs were helpful to have as comparisons as well. Glyph of Demon Training will no longer be a DPS increase when they’re energy limited, rather than time limited. The Void Lord’s damage will go down considerably once it stops spamming Torment non-stop. The Void Lord is intended to be strong DPS while it is actively tanking, but not while not tanking.

In short, shouldn't Grimoire pets do as much dmg as regular pets for that duration and benefit from mastery, crit, haste and sp equally?
Yes. There’s currently a bug where the guardians don’t inherit your stats, making them do considerably less damage.

Seeds of Corruption:Now this spell has turned into an amazing spell compared to its current state on live. You get to keep corruption AND can have 2 seeds on one target (soulburn and regular seed) which is amazing. The question is, How are we suppose to use this spell now? spam seed the same target or do it on multiple ones? The problem is that it takes really long to detonate (cast time + travel time + detonation time) especially if you are trying to seed multiple targets. I am not sure if affliction can keep up with the other classes since the AoE is not bursty and on demand like for example, Mind seer.
We’re trying to focus on ‘how does this work under the hood’ sort of questions, rather than ‘why did you design it this way’ or ‘how are we supposed to use this’ sort of questions, but I’ll comment on this since there’s a few significant changes to Seed of Corruption that I’d like to call out.

Old Seed of Corruption: Broke on any non-proc’d damage from any source. Typically spammed on one target while in a group, and other players’ damage broke it. The ‘non-proc’d’ requirement probably is never even noticed, but includes Seed’s explosion itself. i.e., if you seed multiple mobs, the explosions from one will not pop the others.

New Seed of Corruption: Breaks on any damage from you. The explosion from one (and indeed, any other proc’d damage) CAN pop other nearby seeds.

While this means that Affliction’s ramp up time on AoEing may be longer than most, it does mean that their potential burst (when there’s time to setup the seeds) is incredibly high; Seed multiple mobs and the explosion from one will typically set off all of the others in a chain reaction. 8 Seeds exploding at the same time is probably the most burst AoE damage in the game right now, but also requires significant setup time, so isn’t really “on demand” burst. Still, it should be such that if you’re AoEing near a boss that you have already DoTs up on, it’s easy to Seed the boss and then start seeding the other mobs while your DoTs pop the boss’ seed. Additionally, the ability for Seed of Corruption and Soulburn: Seed of Corruption to stack was unintended, but we’re currently going to leave it and see how that plays out. We may change that in the future (mostly due to it not being intuitive), but will experiment with it for now.

Drain Soul is supposed to replace Affliction filler malefic grasp at certain points in fights, most notably during the execution phase of any fight sub 20%, but it is not currently supported by the talents that are supposed to affect Warlock filler spells (Soul Leach and Affliction's Grimoire of Sacrifice)
The next build should include Drain Soul being affected by Soul Leech and Grimoire of Sacrifice.

Warrior (Forums)The execute ability is currently doing a TON of damage (equivalent to around 2 slams) is this intended?
Yes. We want to restore that button to its former glory. We figure anyone in execute range in PvP is within a couple of globals of dying already.

The removal of rage from white swings has completely removed Haste as a viable defensive stat for prot warriors… even for bears it's scales with their rage generation
The difference is that the gear we intend for Prot warriors has no haste or crit on it while the gear we intend for Guardian druids does. We don't want to slap players wrists too hard who use gear outside of what we intend, but at the same time, if we were ever in a place where the DPS plate want the crit / haste gear AND the plate tanks want the crit / haste gear, there will be some tears.

Crit is somewhat in same boat, it offers no defensive value.
You can still become Enraged, which increases rage income. As I said though, plate tanks scaling with crit is in the "nice to have" category for us.

Conversely Expertise and Hit are ridiculously powerful against rage dry spots.
On the other hand, this was by design. Unlike haste and crit, we do put hit and expertise on tanking gear, and we don’t think tanks will ever value those stats enough if they are just for threat.

I really do think Bears Rage model is really good, half their rage from white swings half from active abilities.
We changed it for a few reasons, largely based on feedback. When rage comes from white attacks, then it comes in unpredictably instead of the big chunks from yellow attacks. Now granted the other two warrior specs still must contend with that issue, but it’s usually not an issue of the group wiping if the Arms warrior mismanages rage. Secondly, when you’re kiting or moving which are not uncommon for tanks, any rage from white attacks get shut off. Your yellow attacks you can save to a degree. That said, we could experiment with putting a little rage on white attacks, but it would have to come from Shield Slam, Revenge and Devasate, because we think the overall income of rage for Protection is at the right level. We don’t want the defensive buttons to feel like something you keep up all the time like the Thunder Clap debuff.

So you're not concerned about Execute displacing Overpowers, completely removing Heroic Strike, and possibly also displacing Mortal Strike?
For 20% of the fight? No. The idea is that your rotation changes when the target is in Execute range. Overpower is free and Heroic Strike might still be applicable if your rage income is faster than you can Execute, so I don’t think the rotation just becomes Execute, Execute, Execute.

With the removal of Vengence, it did not fix my issues with Defensive Stance, but more so nerfed the better alternative. (No vengence = less Attack Power = weaker Barrier) Even so, Battle Stance still out-does Defensive by a fair margin.
Additionally, Shield Slam and Revenge will only generate rage in Defensive Stance in a future build. We want to leave some room for Prot warriors to go into Battle Stance when OT'ing or perhaps when solo, and we want to leave some room for Arms and Fury to use Defensive Stance when emergency tanking.

I can think of many things - but Anger Management used to be a part of our toolkit and that added into our current design would help break the spikey feeling without worry of making the pool too big from auto-attacks.
Baking in Anger Management to Defensive Stance as a solution to diminish spikes without tying rage to auto attacks nor making Prot warriors have too much Battle Stance envy is sensible. We might try it again.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Raid Testing Schedule - June 22
For Friday, June 22 we'll be testing just one encounter, the 10 player Normal difficulty version of the Stone Guard encounter in Mogu'shan Vaults. There will be further opportunities to test this encounter. Think of today as a warmup!

The encounter should be available at approximately the listed times below for all Beta Test Realms, regardless of suggested geographical region.

As always, this testing schedule is very fluid. We might have to change the time of a testing session due to various issues with bugs, builds, server hardware issues, designers being sick, class issues, etc. Keep an eye on this forum for the latest information. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Two Dungeons Disabled for this Beta Build
We're in the process of turning off both Temple of the Jade Serpent and Shado-pan Monastery at this time due to a client crash error when viewing the Sha boss model. This makes defeating these bosses... very difficult.

First, Strength gives a very significant parry chance to paladins, warriors, and DKs directly (just like Agility gives dodge chance for rogues, druids, shaman, hunters, and monks). We don't want Agi to be very attractive to plate-users and Str for leather/mail dudes.

I'm completly fine with that, but why does have Hunter negate -17,5% dodge chance before agility even is noticeable as a dodge improvment? Fix it plz! =(

Remember when Blizzard used to create things, instead of shamelessly ripping off memes?
Yeah, you have to go a ways back, now.

Like never? They did Zelda, Donkey Kong and Mario and other "meme" stuff in the vanilla WoW...

Whenever I read a reply to me that starts with, "So what you're saying is..." -- and I've read so, so many -- my first thought is,
"What I'm saying is what I'm saying, otherwise I would've said something else."